Accern Corp., a natural language processing startup focused on the financial services sector, today announced that it has closed a $20 million funding round co-led by Mighty Capital and Fusion Fund.

The Series B round follows two years in which Accern’s revenue has reportedly increased by a factor of nine. The startup’s total outside funding now stands at more than $34 million.

New York-based Accern provides a natural language processing platform that financial services firms use to find insights in their unstructured data. Accern’s platform can ingest financial filings, news articles, internal company documents and many other types of unstructured information. It then uses natural language processing algorithms to find notable data points.

Asset management firms can use Accern’s platform to track market developments that may affect their investment portfolios. A private equity firm could leverage the platform to collect financial and competitive data points about companies in which it’s considering investing.

Accern provides a catalog of more than 250 pre-trained natural language processing algorithms as part of its platform. The algorithms don’t require coding know-how to use and can be customized for a company’s requirements in a few minutes, the startup says. Accern positions its platform as a faster alternative to training neural networks from scratch, which can take a significant amount of time. 

Accern provides a tool that allows users to specify what data points a natural language algorithm should search for when scanning unstructured information. An algorithm could, for example, be configured to search for financial events such as mergers or earnings reports. Accern’s platform can detect tens of thousands of data points out of the box and enables organizations to add custom data categories when needed. 

“In addition to making it easy for citizen data scientists to access highly accurate pre-trained models, we also enable them to customize their own AI/NLP workflows by bringing their own documents, entities, themes, models and downstream integrations,” stated Accern co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Anshul Vikram Pandey.

Accern’s customers include major financial institutions such as Tokyo-based Mizuho Financial Group Inc., one of the world’s largest banks, and investment firm William Blair & Co. The startup plans to further expand its installed base using its newly announced funding round by accelerating sales and marketing initiatives.

Accern is one of several startups applying artificial intelligence to financial tasks. Glean Analytics Inc. in March raised $10.8 million for its AI-powered accounts payable platform, which helps corporate finance teams find opportunities to reduce costs. Earlier, Candis Candis GmbH closed a $14 million investment to automate repetitive aspects of finance teams’ work using machine learning. 

Image: Accern